Menu

Monthly Archives: August 2012

Before I met Neil Armstrong’s mother, I bought a new suit. It was gray with blue pin stripes. I looked like a twenty-year-old banker in it. A pimply twenty-year-old banker. I thought of that suit again yesterday when the news came…

Briefly, when the magazine was in its heyday, I wrote for Cosmopolitan, and that’s when I fell in love with Michael Douglas–helped along by Helen Gurley Brown. I thought of her and my uneasy association with Cosmopolitan when I heard that…

I’m not certain exactly when I became so fascinated with Christopher Plummer. It may have been as a teenager when I got up at six one morning and drove to Stratford to line up at the Festival Theatre for rush…

I remember the day clearly. Fifty years ago, in the time when news still arrived in newspapers, the afternoon edition of the Toronto Telegram fell onto our small town Ontario doorstep reporting that Marilyn Monroe, age thirty-six, had been found dead at…

Gore Vidal in print once called me “the Dread Ron Base, who is appropriately named.” I’m not sure but I think he dissed me because I quoted him as saying he would invade Alberta for its oil, if necessary (“If I were the federal…